Staff Database Reliability Engineer

Checkr • San Francisco, CO

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

Checkr is building a data platform that supports safe and fair decisions for more than 140,000 companies and millions of people. Reporting to the Manager, DevOps Engineering, the Staff Database Reliability Engineer will lead the architecture, reliability, and operational excellence of Checkr’s core data stores. The role owns database capacity planning, financial forecasting, high availability, disaster recovery, and infrastructure-as-code automation across high-scale distributed data stores.

The engineer will partner with Infrastructure, Site Reliability Engineering, Core Services, and Product Engineering to establish fleet-wide data governance and performance standards. The role includes designing multi-cloud database architecture, securing sensitive data, provisioning and maintaining cloud database systems, optimizing database performance, improving observability, automating operational workflows, and leading responses to critical database incidents. The position also provides technical leadership, mentors engineers, and shapes and communicates the long-term database architecture strategy.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 10 or more years of experience designing, administering, and scaling relational and non-relational database storage architectures in production environments.
• Deep expertise managing and tuning MongoDB and PostgreSQL or MySQL database topologies at high volume and scale.
• Understanding of software engineering fundamentals, including data structures and software design principles, and the ability to apply them to technical challenges.
• Extensive hands-on experience with AWS database and storage ecosystems, including RDS, Aurora, ElastiCache, MongoDB Atlas, and S3.
• Demonstrated experience automating cloud infrastructure and database operations using Terraform, Terragrunt, and modern scripting languages.
• Strong technical leadership skills and a demonstrated ability to guide engineering teams through database schema design, zero-downtime migrations such as gh-ost, and security compliance standards.
• Bias for action, ownership, resilience through ambiguity, and a focus on delivering meaningful outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Lead architectural design, high-availability strategies including multi-region deployments, and business continuity and disaster recovery solutions across Checkr’s multi-cloud database fleet.
• Mentor and develop engineers, and promote high standards across the team.
• Drive the long-term vision and strategy for database architecture, communicate it to engineers and leadership, and propose projects that advance that vision.
• Protect highly sensitive data through encryption and security-first architecture.
• Provision, scale, and maintain cloud database systems across production, staging, and sandbox environments using infrastructure as code.
• Optimize database performance at the query, schema, connection, and instance levels across PostgreSQL or MySQL and MongoDB workloads.
• Partner with Site Reliability Engineering to build proactive observability, automated alerting, and diagnostic tools for database health and performance.
• Automate operational toil, maintenance workflows, schema migrations, and backup lifecycle policies to improve reliability and engineering velocity.
• Lead diagnosis and resolution of incidents and conduct post-incident reviews for critical database alerts and outages affecting customer-serving infrastructure.
• Partner with Infrastructure, Site Reliability Engineering, Core Services, and Product Engineering to establish fleet-wide data governance and performance standards.

Benefits

• Learning and development allowance.
• Competitive cash and equity compensation, with opportunity for advancement.
• 100% medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• Up to $25,000 reimbursement for fertility, adoption, and parental planning services.
• Flexible PTO policy.
• Monthly wellness stipend.
• In-office lunch five times a week, commuter stipend, snacks, and beverages.
• Relocation stipend may be available for people willing to relocate to a Checkr hub location.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior